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The story of an elderly man who takes on the care of his young great-nephew has some lovely moments but strains the reader’s credulity
Not the Booker 2020 shortlist: read along with us!
Early on in Akin, Emma Donoghue’s 12th novel, we are told that her 79-year-old protagonist Noah took up smoking after the death of his wife because “he’d just needed something else to do with his hands when they reached for her and closed on nothing”.
This is typical of Akin: the words roll off the page, the image is tender and sad, conjuring not only the awfulness of that grasp on emptiness, but its repetition too. But then I started to overthink it. What exactly did Noah do to his wife when reaching for her? Was it tied up in coffee drinking, like his smoking habit? Did he reach for her seven or eight times a day? My questions became absurd, but this all points to a broader problem: like a previously non-smoking scientist suddenly reaching for a fag packet, something about Donoghue’s story doesn’t feel quite real. Continue reading...